Robin Geldard, senior partner with Cardiff firm Edwards Geldard, cut his legal and business teeth at his father's practice in Cardiff docks.In those days, the city was the world's greatest exporter of coal, and the smell of commerce hung heavily in the air around Cardiff Bay.

One building in the docks area was home to Cardiff's stock exchange, coal and shipping exchange and its chamber of commerce.

That was how Mr Geldard first became involved in the chambers movement.

This year that involvement culminated in his appointment for a two-year stint as president of the Association of British Chambers of Commerce (ABCC), the umbrella organisation for 200 chambers representing more than 200,000 businesses.

'For many years, chambers were gentlemen's clubs at which people met to gather business information,' he says.

'It is only recently that people have realised that they should be delivering services to business like training, representation and information networks.'He adds: 'We claim to be truly representative of the small and medium-sized business - we have a much wider membership than the CBI, for example.'Heading up that organisation is a demanding task for the president, consuming up to three full days a week on average.

He also acts as the Japanese consul in Wales, an important role given that the principality is home to the highest concentration of Japanese companies located in the UK.'It is fairly hectic,' Mr Geldard says, signing a pile of ABCC submissions to the political great and good detailing its response to the government's recent white paper on competitiveness.

'For the first time in my memory, politicians have at last acknowledged that businesses are probably about the most important thing they look after, and that without them they have nothing to govern.'But, while the ABCC president is keen to see British industry limbering up to steal the march in international markets, he voices real doubts about the way in which solicitors have begun to see themselves as businesses.

'I do not believe competition is necessarily a good thing for a profession.

It can lead to cutting corners and a downgrading of professional status, and I have no doubt at all that we have lost status in the community.'We have entered the market-place in a way that is unhelpful to us,' he goes on.

'I do not actually think that the flight to the Legal 500, the publication of people's earnings and all the rest of it are a good thing for the profession in the long run.'You cannot bring business ethics to a profession, Mr Geldard asserts.

'We have to run ourselves more efficiently, but that has got to be against a background of professional standards, which I regret have been eroded.'He has strong views on the trend towards specialisation by lawyers which he attacks as 'anathema': 'To say that only some lawyers should be considered as experts in a particular area is absolute rubbish - what are they trained for?'Mr Geldard ar gues that, instead of using specialisation as a means of tackling default, the insurance industry should start to put pressure on incompetent lawyers by the introduction of punitive premia.'If lawyers are claimed against too much, then they ought to pay higher premia until they cannot pay them any more and go out of business.'On the training front, he calls for intervention to prevent the flow of new law graduates who have no prospect of securing a traineeship.'We are training too many people to be lawyers.

I have seen too many broken-hearted young people searching for a job they cannot get,' Mr Geldard says.

'The training of students for the law is a money-making business, and the colleges that produce these students no longer see anything in their eyes but pound signs...And I do think the Law Society bears quite a burden of responsibility for allowing so many people to be trained.'He is especially concerned that the pressure for training places will result in a legal profession entirely stocked with people who got first class and upper second class degrees, 'which would not be the best legal profession'.Edwards Geldard, the firm Robin Geldard set up in 1970 with his father-in-law, former Law Society President Sir Martin Edwards, was a response to the huge growth in statute law coming out of Parliament at the end of the 1960s.'I realised that we could not go on as we had and that specialisation was going to come.

The volume of statute was such that no one man could keep up to date with it all.' It is that specialisation which, ironically, he now thinks has gone too far.In the event, Mr Geldard lobbied Mr Edwards - who had his own practice in Cardiff - incessantly until, staggering back together from a boozy Law Society dinner one night, Mr Edwards finally agreed.'He said: "For God's sake let's stop talking about it.

Come round to my office in the morning and we will sort it out."'Now, along with Eversheds Phillips & Buck, Hugh James Jones & Jenkins and Morgan Bruce, Edwards Geldard is one of Cardiff's 'big four'.

'Cardiff is an interesting place to be in,' reflects Mr Geldard.